March 7, 2011

It is Too Early to Say TERA is Successful

After a silent week, South Korean media have recently expressed their point of view that TERA is now stable but it's still too early to say the game is successful.

In the opinion of South Korean media, TERA saw the number of its simultaneous online players, which kept at 170,000 after Aion 2.5 was updated, slightly drop as its first batch of monthly subscriptions expired on Feb. 24. Though TERA successfully proved its capability of standing longer than one month, problems like the class imbalance and endlessly repeated quests are still criticized bitterly by players.

Fewer Simultaneous Online Players, But More Online Time

TERA made worse achievements in net cafés one month after its commercial service launch. Specifically, the game was enjoyed by only 8.4% players in the net cafés on Feb. 27 and went down to the third place in comparison with 21% on Jan. 30. This was the worst record since TERA entered the OBT stage.

Weekly clicks over TERA also fell by 23% from 477,000 to 367,000, and about 16,000 players quit the game. In contrast, the competitor Aion witnessed its clicks rise from 540,000 to 580,000 in Feb. (Korean Aion is mainly played by those spending most time at home.)

As players often had to wait more than 2 hours to play TERA at weekends, they can now log onto the game servers and enjoy gameplay directly.

But what's strange is that though TERA suffered a decline in both clicks and the number of online players, there's generally an increase in players' online time.

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Polarized Instances

TERA's instances are now faced with serious polarization, i.e. some old instances (launched upon OBT) are able to be beaten down within dozens of minutes, and some new ones like "Golden Maze" and "Akmha's Hideout" need 6~7 hours to be conquered.

Political System to Be Updated in April

After more than one month's uncolored commercial service, many players show great interest in the political system, which will be updated in Apr. as officially disclosed. After all, the political system serves as the core content of TERA. Additionally, the level cap may be raised further, and new areas & instances will also meet players in April.